The boy kissed her hand again in silence, and the compact was sealed, but the subject which neither of them mentioned was continually in both their minds. They went to lessons as usual, and Cecil tried honestly to behave to her pupil just as she had always done; but once or twice the thought of that scene in the Kurdish stronghold returned upon her so powerfully that she turned from him with an irrepressible shudder. She could see it all--the group of fanatical mountaineers on the brow of the precipice surrounding the solitary figure with bound hands and ragged Armenian dress. She could hear the rapid questions and answers passing between the Kurds and their prisoner, and the fierce taunts and shout of derision that succeeded them. And then--then--she saw the headlong plunge outwards into space, the piteous crash, the mangled form that lay motionless at the foot of the steep, a bloodstained heap of rags, as it had appeared to the trembling Hanna, forced to his knees by the murderers on the cliff above that he might behold their work. “Oh, Charlie, Charlie, if I could have died instead!” she cried, wildly, dropping her book and beginning to pace up and down the _lewan_, every nerve throbbing with the bitter consciousness of her own powerlessness at the time of Charlie’s greatest need. And she had known nothing of it at the time! How was it that no sense of his danger had penetrated to her mind--that she had not known intuitively that he was tasting the bitterness of death while she was occupied in trying to still the petty squabbles between her servants and those of Jamileh Khanum? Surely there must be something wanting in her, that such a crisis could arrive in the life of the man to whom her whole heart was given, and she know nothing of it? True, she could not have helped him, but she could have prayed with him and for him, and perhaps some hint of her distant sympathy might have reached him even at that terrible moment.